NEO (NEO) Virtual Machine Receives Another Upgrade

One of the top trading cryptocurrencies by its market capitalization and at the same time the 18th largest digital asset in the market, NEO, has a strong focus on Dapp development, which is why NEO is known as “Ethereum Killer” in some circles.

However, despite the encouraging nickname, Ethereum still has more Dapp users on the daily basis when compared to NEO network, despite the fact that Ethereum platform suffered from several major blows due to the scalability issues that popped out with the famous Dapp Crypto Kitties.

Regardless, as Dapp development is the center of focus for NEO platforms, a virtual machine is its centerpiece, which is why NEO team is said to be constantly working on way to improve NeoVM and make NEO platform into what is described as the friendliest place for developers on blockchain.

NeoVM Upgraded Once Again to Solve an Important Issue

As announced by NEO representatives in an official release on Medium, NeoVM, the virtual machine of NEO network built for Dapp developers, went through another crucial upgrade.

Since the time NeoVM was first introduced to developers almost a year ago back in January 2018, the virtual machine went through two upgrades with the third upgrade being released several days ago on December 28th.

As described in 5the official post on Medium, the VM was first introduced at the beginning of 2018 by Erik Zhang, the founder of NEO.

NeoVM was first introduced at DevCon, while it had its first upgrade from the official version 2.2.1 to version 2.3.0 5 months later in June 2018.

The next upgrade was dubbed 2.3.3 and was officially released back in November.

Since smooth smart contract operations are crucial for the overall functionality of a Dapp-focused blockchain platform such as NEO, the latest upgrade of NeoVM was set to enable more stable and secure smart contract operations.

This goal was achieved by stack isolation, which means that NeoVM is now able to limit the access of smart contracts to a single stack area marked as its own, which should further allow limited errors within smart contract execution.

Further Details on the Latest NeoVM Upgrade to be Released on DevCon 2019

As concluded at the end of the official release on the latest update, the team needed to add a new set of operation controls to match the most recently added stack isolation.

With the new operation controls added to the virtual machine, operation instructions should automatically copy the parameters to the new stack whenever dynamic invocation takes place.

The team further added that there are five new instructions related to the stack isolation, stating that the details will be released on the anniversary of NeoVM launch, on DevCon 2019.